WARNING: Back up your data before doing things I suggest here. Odds are you will break something so don't blame me as this may not work for you... do it at your own risk ;)

So I got a new 275GB Crucial SATA SSD for Christmas for my budget i3 desktop rig that I wanted to move my windows install over from a 500GB HDD. The last time I used clonezilla was a number of years ago (like 2007!), but I had a relatively clean install of Windows with only a few games and programs installed on the hard drive that I wanted to move over preferably without reinstalling Windows all over again since it is still effort. Why make extra work if you can help it?

Clonezilla isn't really made for moving data from a larger drive over to a smaller one like this using d2d cloning, which I guess makes sense, but that doesn't mean we can't make it work. Of course, you can't have more data on the source drive than what the SSD can hold, and who knows what other unknown issues might come up, but I only had the HDD 75GB full and it worked for me. Here's the step by step on how I made it work. Note I'm running Windows 10 Home on UEFI.

In windows I first opened Disk Management (right click This PC in start and click manage) and shrink the partition down on the source drive to something less than the SSD so nothing funky happens.

Create a bootable USB for clonezilla. I simply downloaded the clonezilla ZIP archive, and copied the files over to a blank USB drive formatted as FAT32. Then the F11 menu on my MSI motherboard detected it perfectly on reboot.

Boot to clonezilla (I boot to RAM and remove the USB drive as soon as the blue screen comes up just because I think I recall clonezilla listing the USB drive back in 2007 when I last used it and I wanted to avoid any potential confusion as I'm simple minded. If it's not plugged in, it wont be listed as a disk, right? ;) ).

Choose local disk to local disk cloning (or however it's worded) and then when asked to use Beginner or Expert mode, choose expert mode. You'll have to pick your source and destintion disk but this was pretty easy to understand minus the standard sda/sdb linux disk naming, it shows the disk drive size too so pretty easy to identify!

In expert mode options, I left the flags that are already selected default but I turned on -icds which skips checking disk sizes.

After that I chose k1 option on the next screen and watch it go.

THE LAST TWO OPTIONS ARE NECESSARY for this to work. If you forget the icds flag or the k1 option afterwards it will fail if not destroy your data if you screw something else up.

It moved all the data over and then resized the partition perfectly so that on reboot, the PC booted to the SSD perfectly (even though windows wanted to initially run chkdsk which I let it do and it was fine!). You can (and should) confirm this through disk management just in case, just make sure you boot to the SSD in case your motherboard defaults to the hard drive.

From there, I want to use the HDD as a regular storage drive. So I opened cmd as administrator, ran command diskpart, listed disks (using list disk) and selected the Hard drive disk with select disk 1 in my case (yours may be different!), then ran the command clean.

Then I went back to Disk Management, made sure the C drive partition was using all available space on the ssd (it was, clonezilla did it's job) and reformatted the HDD. Perfect. The whole process only took a few minutes.

Now I should say while this worked for me it may not necessarily work for everyone, of course, BACKUP YOUR DATA JUST IN CASE. Worst case scenario for me was I'd just have to reinstall Windows anyway since it was a fairly clean install and I had nothing important on it so I was willing to just dive in head first and try it. Your case may be different, so keep your data backed up before messing around in case you need to start from scratch!

About

My name is Jonah. A random guy from Nova Scotia, Canada who has an interest in computers and linux. This is my blog where I post mostly tech related stuff that I'm interested in, especially if it's otherwise hard to find online.

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